If you're a young tech type looking at what new solution might sweep over and remake the K-12 landscape, it's not clear you'd see charters as an obvious candidate. How enthusiastic do you think Silicon Valley VCs might be about a product that had captured only 5 percent of market share after a quarter-century?

Personalized education? OK, maybe. But don’t tell me you want your kids brought up in a classroom without teachers... No one is going to disrupt teachers away. Teaching is probably the most difficult of all current jobs for an AI to manage.

Time and again in education, big-name investors have launched companies with the broadest ambitions, only to be undone by more-focused players...The benefits of a national footprint are seldom as obvious. Yet it is national scale that many ventures have sought. That failure, repeated so consistently, has given credible fodder to people who resist the active participation of for-profit enterprises in the educational sphere.

If you want to try and understand how education writers and editors decide to write the stories that they produce -- and how they come out the way they do -- it's good to know what they're being told. (And if you're a savvy education editor or reporter it's also a good thing to know a little about what you're being told.)

For example, later this week in Chicago is the Education Writers Association's mini-conference on The ABCs of ESSA, in which they association will try and make sure that education reporters know about the new federal law and how it's going to be implemented.

The preliminary schedule of events to be held in Chicago includes appearances from CCSSO's Chris Minnich, LPI's Charmaine Mercer, the Leadership Conference's Liz King, and former EdWeek editor and reporter Erik Robelen (now at EWA). I'm also supposed to be there (as an attendee).

There are also going to be appearances from the USDE's Emma Vadehra, some discussion about low-performing school interventions (including someone from San Francisco's Mission High), and a panel on great ESSA stories led by NPR's Steve Drummond, Chalkbeat's Scott Elliott, and the Joyce Foundation's Stephanie Banchero. AFT head Randi Weingarten was scheduled to be there -- probably the highest-profile person on the original speakers list -- but she's being replaced by staffer Rob Weil.

Anything notable about the list of topics and attendees? Anyone left out? Education journalism didn't do an entirely stellar job describing NCLB to the public. Ditto for Common Core. Crossed fingers that ESSA training and the subsequent coverage are both strong.

WSJ: "The past 25 years have seen a growing split between households with different levels of educational attainment. The median household led by someone with a master’s degree earns $7,655 more per year than in 1991. Those with some college, but no degree, earn $7,768 less and those with a high-school diploma but no further education earn $6,316 less." (U.S. Poverty and Income Inequality in 9 Charts - Real Time Economics)

According to a new survey of teachers reported in THE Journal, interactive whiteboards were the third most-hated category among teachers. (First and second most-hated were mobile phones and desktops.) However, 68 percent of respondents said those are in use at their schools.

You cannot turn around centuries of lack of advantage in a generation. Nobody's ever done that in the history of mankind... We've got to sustain this for 30, 40, 50 years if we're going to see some real change.

Fans of high-quality nonfiction and those concerned about education and segregation should check out Matthew Desmond's pretty amazing book, Evicted, out earlier this year.

Focusing on the lives of poor white and black residents of one midsized city (Milwaukee), but making a national case, Desmond shows why poor people tend to move more often, but largely stay within confined geographic areas.

"There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond in this brilliant book about housing and the lives of eight families in Milwaukee. (Via The Guardian)

The educational impacts of children whose families are moving frequently aren't the focus of the book, but they're ever-present: Lost sleep, changes of schools, going hungry, lack of heat or electricity, and constant worry. Families with children are much more likely to be evicted, notes this Mother Jones article.

The book also shows how academics and policymakers have missed much of what's going on by focusing on relatively small parts of the problem (federal housing vouchers and public housing) rather than larger ones (the private market) most poor renters inhabit.

Last but not least, Evicted shows that it's not just slumlords who are culpable for the deplorable, exploitative situation. The legal system, law enforcement, and even social support agencies all play a role in creating and perpetuating things -- and tolerating what's clearly intolerable.

Curious why states and districts are so upset with the notion of having to reallocate funding in order to remain eligible for ESSA? According to FiveThirtyEight, state funding has gone down nearly 7 percent since 2008, and student spending over all has gone down over 2 percent during the same period -- even as enrollments have increased (a bit).

This NYT map and accompanying story (Here’s Where They Went) shows the 231 towns and cities where the 10,000 Syrian refugees accepted into the United States have been settled over the past four years.

These numbers are tiny compared to what other nations are doing currently or what the US has done in the past with Cuban and Vietnamese refugees, points out the Times.

Big cities like NYC, Chicago, and LA haven't been among the leaders compared to affordable mid-sized citeis. "Boise, Idaho, has accepted more refugees than New York and Los Angeles combined; Worcester, Mass., has taken in more than Boston."

"The suit claims district administrators routinely sent older refugee students to a "disciplinary school" that subjected them to bullying, intense security protocols and an accelerated learning program that runs counter to conventional wisdom on the subject."

As I read it, this piece in The New Yorker (Pale Fire) suggests that the current conflict over education reform is in many ways the playing out of long-simmering white-on-white class conflicts.

If so, this would suggest that focusing narrowly on social justice issues -- while entirely understandable in short-term tactical terms -- could only exacerbate the conflict and theoretically slow progress.

It's nothing you haven't thought or read or perhaps articulated yourself, but a worthwhile reminder.

"The richest 25 percent of school districts receive 15.6 percent more funds from state and local governments per student than the poorest 25 percent of school districts, the federal Department of Education pointed out last month (March, 2015). That’s a national funding gap of $1,500 per student, on average, according to the most recent data, from 2011-12. The gap has grown 44 percent since 2001-02, when a student in a rich district had only a 10.8 percent resource advantage over a student in a poor district."

Reform critics like to talk about big social issues like poverty, or focus on reform challenges like racial segregation in charter schools, but downplay ignore structural issues in public education like school assignment policies and district boundaries.

It's not just attendance zones and school assignment policies within districts that contribute to segregation and school inequality. According to a new report from EdBuild, school district boundaries themselves play a dramatic role in "segregating communities and separating low-income kids from educational opportunity." The most vivid examples of this effect are "island" districts entirely surrounded by other school districts of vastly different means.

"The way we fund schools in the United States creates incentives for communities to segregate along socioeconomic lines in order to preserve local wealth. In so doing, communities create arbitrary borders that serve to lock students into, or out of, opportunity. This reality is especially glaring in the case of island school districts that are entirely surrounded by single districts of very different means."

While there are nearly 200 examples nationwide, the report highlights examples in Oakland, Freehold NJ, and Columbus OH.

"Of the 100 districts that receive the most per-pupil funding from the state, the overwhelming majority have residents who spend below the state average when it comes to the share of personal income that goes to local property taxes for schools." (The story of Pennsylvania's per-pupil school funding)

Today and tomorrow, the NYT is gathering EdSec John King, Carmen Farina, Pasi Sahlberg, Angela "Grit" Duckworth, and others for its annual education conference. Times journalists including Kate Zernike and Nikole Hannah-Jones are scheduled to participate.

"The New York Times will bring together the most influential leaders in higher education – including presidents, provosts, chancellors and other decision-makers at colleges and universities ... to explore and assess the most pressing issues on campuses today."

As you can probably tell, the event is focused on higher education and called the Higher Ed Leaders Forum. The issues highlighted in the promo materials include "diversity and free-speech dilemmas, the STEM-humanities debate, sexual assault, the digital future, the crisis in public funding of education and much more."

Check out the schedule here. Far as I can tell, there's no livestream.

We like to think of the spelling bee as a lovely example of students memorizing crazy words and smiling, but as this Vine from last week "Cold Game At The Spelling Bee" shows, sometimes the real world's not such a fairy tale. #edgifs

Philanthropists are not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn’t be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation’s public schools. The Gates experience teaches once again that educational silver bullets are in short supply and that some educational trends live only a little longer than mayflies.

"At the second annual Education Summit, The Atlantic will illuminate the most pressing debates in the education world today, from cradle to college," says the promo copy for Education Summit 2016. It start tomorrow morning and continues Wednesday, in DC. Topics under discussed are listed as ESSA, Common Core, School to Prison Pipeline, Speech on College Campuses, and College Affordability. Speakers and panelists include Jen Holleran, executive director of Startup:Education (part of the Chan Zuckerberg effort). The Atlantic's education editor, Alia Wong, will also participate. Hashtag? Livestream? LMK.

Signs abound that this era of polarization is giving way to a different and more constructive phase in U.S. efforts to boost student achievement.... The dawn of a new era of K-12 philanthropy .... Funders [like Walton and Broad] are no longer the dominant drivers.

NSVF was the first place I saw Google Glass (RIP), and I'm guessing that this year's event will be full of drone demos, holograms/VR, hoverboards, 3D printers, bots, and wearables. AltSchool's Max Ventilla will be a mini-celebrity. Newly-hired Chan Zuckerberg honcho Jim Shelton will be a full-on celebrity.

No surprise -- everyone's doing it -- one of the big pushes at NSVF this year is trying to create an authentic, diverse movement. LEE's organizing guru Mark Fraley, is going to be speaking, along with #BlackLivesMatter's Brittany Packnett and DREAMer José Patiño.

Here's my latest Scholastic Administrator column, about the Teach for America Reboot: "The controversy surrounding TFA may have been helpful, in the end. As Villanueva Beard told Politico, “'I’m grateful for when people make our shortcomings clear, because it enables us to get better.'”

We already have so much work to do to try to close the achievement gap that this is a distraction... It's not Latino parents, it's not African-American parents. We don't have the time to be wasting trying to opt out. We need to know exactly how the kids are doing because when they go to college, if they are not prepared it's going to cost people more money.

Last week, the cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools told teachers to stay home on a pre-Easter Weekend furlough day. On Friday, the Chicago Teachers Union is calling on teachers to picket schools rather than teach in them to protect the district and state's lack of funding.